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Military Transformation

ECHNOLOGIES of wealth and war have always been related. Underlying the
problem facing the United States is the spread of technology from Western
nations to a wider group of countries, with Asian ones predominant. Asia's
industrialization entails military transformation, because it leads to a
greater capacity to absorb technology, which further stimulates demand for
technology. It is a momentous shift that is barely appreciated in the West -- one
as irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel,
Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea all have ballistic-missile programs. No
doubt some of these countries are more dangerous than others. But missiles are
becoming endemic throughout Asia.

The spread of missiles is greatly assisted by techniques originally used in
international business. Iraq's military buildup in the 1980s is illustrative.
The government operated hand in hand with multinational corporations. Saddam
Hussein schooled his engineers in the West, bought difficult-to-make weapons
components from Europe, the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union, used
management consultants, and relied on engineering contract workers from Russia
and North Korea to build his arsenal.

Recently another innovation has appeared, one that could have been taken from a
Harvard Business School case study on how to internationalize a business
rapidly. Scud-missile "knock-down kits" are appearing, courtesy of China,
Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Knock-down kits are familiar to anyone involved
in international business; the idea was developed by the multinational
automobile giants Ford, Toyota, and General Motors, to sell unassembled cars in
developing countries, where the kits could be assembled in "screwdriver"
plants. They permit a very rapid expansion of production capacity without the
bother of providing infrastructure. Now Syria is opening an assembly plant for
Scud-missile knock-down kits. Management innovation of this sort, and not
merely the missile itself, is changing the Asian military landscape.

China has married its considerable engineering knowledge to similar
international linkages, in order to produce organizations far more
sophisticated than anything devised by Saddam Hussein. It is not just that
Russia is selling navigation and communications equipment to China. Rather, an
understanding of how the technologies work has spread, and new technical
institutes have been set up to exploit them. The techno-managerial focus of
China's armed forces marks a dramatic change from the political focus of the
Maoist era, which was reflected in the world's largest infantry.

Missile Knowledge

AST Asia is developing military technologies at an ever-increasing pace.
Chinese ballistic missiles demonstrate this fast learning curve. In 1995 and
1996 Beijing used a series of missile tests to intimidate Taiwan, in response
to what China perceived as Taiwanese offenses: President Lee Teng-hui's visit
to the United States in June of 1995 and his flirtations with Taiwanese
independence during the elections of March, 1996. The missiles carried research
equipment, but their payloads could just as easily have been warheads.

Nearly all attention to these tests in the United States centered on the
question of what the Chinese leaders were up to with this missile diplomacy.
What were they trying to signal? Was it an indication that the political
leaders were bowing to pressure from the army, and if so, what did this say
about the future direction of Chinese foreign policy? More important than this
version of Chinese Kremlinology is what the tests showed about China's missile
knowledge.

Over eight months Beijing substantially improved the accuracy of its missiles,
enhancing their capacity to strike precise targets in Taiwan. In the first
tests, in July of 1995, the Chinese fired two DF missiles daily for three
straight days. The DF 15 (for "Dong Feng," or "East Wind") is a mobile missile
with a range of 600 miles. It is launched from a trailer, which can be hidden
from satellite or aerial reconnaissance in the same way that Saddam Hussein hid
his Scuds from U.S. air attack during the Gulf War.

These tests were not a success. Of six missiles fired, one had to be destroyed
over China because of a guidance malfunction, and two others hit the outer edge
of the target zone. But eight months later, in March of 1996, matters had
changed considerably. In this test four missiles were launched at two target
areas in the East and South China Seas -- one near the Taiwanese port of
Kaohsiung and the other near the port of Keelung. This time all four missiles
landed with near pinpoint accuracy.

This was an extraordinary achievement. In 1958 the Atlas, the first American
long-range missile, was accurate only within one mile. Since accuracy is vital
in the nuclear era, much research has been devoted to improving it. Still, not
until the early 1980s did the U.S. Minuteman III and Pershing II missiles
achieve accuracies measured in hundreds of feet or less. Likewise, in the late
1950s the Soviet SS 8 missile had an accuracy of one mile, and only with the SS
18s and 19s, in the early 1980s, did the Soviets achieve accuracies of a few
hundred feet. What took the United States and the Soviet Union twenty-five
years to learn took China eight months.

The implications are ominous for Taiwan, which depends on its modern
infrastructure to maintain its place in the world. With forty-five missiles
China could virtually close Taiwan's ports, airfields, waterworks, and power
plants, and destroy the oil-storage facilities of a nation that needs continual
replenishment from the outside world. Accurate missiles would permit this with
minimal civilian casualties, using conventional warheads in attacks no larger
than those the United States has launched against Iraq on two occasions since
the Gulf War. Taiwan is clearly a potential flashpoint between the United
States and China. Zbigniew Brzezinski has even argued that the United States
should intervene to stop a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, because it would so
damage American geopolitical interests in the whole Asia-Pacific region. But
before making Taiwan the centerpiece of U.S. strategy in Asia, and before going
to war with China, Washington needs to think through what it is doing. For five
decades the United States militarily dominated Asia by operating from forward
bases that were secure and by sailing warships that were immune from attack.
With the increased reach of Chinese missiles, this era is rapidly coming to a
close.

The National Defense Panel, a Pentagon advisory body, has highlighted this
issue. Its December, 1997, report Transforming Defense: National Security in
the 21st Century states,

Even if we retain the necessary bases and port infrastructure to
support forward deployed forces, they will be vulnerable to strikes that could
reduce or neutralize their utility. Precision strikes, weapons of mass
destruction, and cruise and ballistic missiles all present threats to our
forward presence, particularly as stand-off ranges increase. So, too, do they
threaten access to strategic geographic areas. Widely available national and
commercial space-based systems providing imagery, communication, and position
location will greatly multiply the vulnerability of fixed and, perhaps, mobile
forces as well.

Most Pentagon studies focus on war, however, and
fail to make the distinction between actually using missiles and threatening to use them. Their non-use could be more significant than their use. It
does not follow that if China were to obtain a wide-ranging and accurate
missile capacity, it would be inclined to launch its missiles against U.S.
bases. But if forward engagement is to mean anything, it needs credible
military power on the Asian periphery, and the very possibility that China
could hit U.S. forward bases with ballistic missiles erodes our
credibility, especially when those missiles could carry chemical, biological,
or nuclear weapons. Astute Pentagon players are concerned that this credibility
gap creates forward hostages rather than forward bases -- hostages that could be
manipulated to expose the precarious position of the world's only superpower.

The capacity to strike, as distinct from actually striking, could force the
United States and its host nations to think twice about reinforcing forward
bases in the first place, if doing so might trigger an attack and major
escalation. Forward movements might thus increasingly be seen as likelier to
escalate a crisis than to dampen it. Reluctance to run the risk of drawing fire
could be considerable, and would certainly strain the most breakable part of
forward engagement -- host-nation political approval. Few countries would
actually want to attack U.S. bases. But many would like to attack America's
status as the world's lone superpower.

Missile Defense

HE United States is reacting to these developments with a major initiative
in defensive missiles -- that is, missiles that can shoot down ballistic
missiles. Missile defense has been around for a long time. But in the past its
purpose was chiefly the protection of the U.S. homeland from Soviet attack. Now
missile defense is considered crucial to protect forward bases. The 1995
Pentagon study United States Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific
Region asserts that missile defense plays "a key role" and is "essential to
counter long range ballistic missile delivery systems in the inventory of many
East Asian nations."

Shooting down a missile is a lot like hitting a bullet with another bullet. But
missiles travel faster than bullets, and they explode. In the compressed time
available defensive missiles must be fired very close to an attacking missile's
launch time; otherwise they are likely to miss their target.

In 1993 an important test of defensive missiles showed how anxious the Pentagon
was about ballistic-missile attacks on bases. Chemical weapons are best
delivered not as a single bomb package but as a bundle of bomblets. Syria's
Scud C missile, for instance, uses mini-canisters filled with nerve agents
packed into a warhead that is built to cast the canisters over a wide area,
contaminating a base, a port, or an airfield. In the 1993 test a missile
carrying thirty-eight canisters of water to simulate a ballistic missile armed
with such a chemical warhead was annihilated by the defender missile. But some
critics charge that tests like this one are in effect rigged for success.
Still, the 1993 experiment does demonstrate that defensive missiles could shoot
down some incoming missiles, although everyone agrees that the smallest glitch
would mean failure.

Whether ballistic-missile defenses will work depends on technical specifics and
geometry. American technological know-how could serve us well here. But missile
defense is also a political and economic problem, one whose geographic shape is
dictated by the American bases concentrated in northeastern and southwestern
Asia. But if our bases are welcome throughout Asia, why are so many countries
building missiles that will make them obsolete? Missile defense has not come to
grips with this fundamental problem.

For thirty years every Administration that has faced the question of national
missile defense has done so with the recognition that it will work only if the
threat is somehow limited. In the late 1960s Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara originally opposed missile defense for the United States, because the
Soviets could easily counter it by building more missiles, essentially
exhausting the defense with cheaper offensive missiles. The Nixon
Administration initially favored missile defense, but simultaneously called for
arms-control negotiations, to limit the offensive. This produced the Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks. Likewise, the Reagan Administration advanced its
Strategic Defense Initiative along with SALT, again seeking to limit the
offense. Over a thirty-year period Moscow and Washington cooperatively
engaged.

But there is no cooperative engagement between the United States and Asia on
missiles. Neither China nor India is involved in the latest round of START. Nor
is there any plan to limit ballistic missiles made indigenously. Limits on
cross-border trade in missile parts are ineffective, as experience with Iran
and North Korea shows. China would never sign an arms-control agreement that
guaranteed the invulnerability of U.S. bases in Asia. Nor would many other
countries. The one-sided character of such an agreement -- which would
permanently lock China and others into technological inferiority to America -- is
clear to all.

Yet without some limit on the number of missiles that China might deploy,
defense becomes prohibitively expensive, because China can counter American
missile defenses with cheap offsetting actions. Missiles can be made to fly
faster, for example, forcing a defender to retrofit his own force in response.
They can be made to spiral in a path difficult for the defender to hit, or some
of them can carry decoys to distract the defender's missiles -- the number of
options is enormous. Counters to these countermeasures exist, but each move
drives up the defender's costs much further than it does the attacker's. A
faster warhead with a smaller chance of detection by radar, for example,
necessitates new radars and space-tracking systems to see it.

During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow considered missile defenses in
situations very different from those now facing the United States in Asia.
Defenses had to protect ICBMs that were housed in superhardened concrete silos.
Our forward bases in Asia, however, are called soft targets for a reason.
Exposed troops, airplanes, equipment, repair stations, and ammunition and bomb
stocks need a defensive shield more impermeable than anything offered by
Reagan's SDI program. Rather than defending our ICBMs for a few hours, the
protective bubble might be needed against repeated or even continuous salvos.
Several hundred missiles -- perhaps several thousand -- would have to be dealt
with.

Forward bases could become like the Crusaders' forts of the Middle
East -- heavily defended but isolated outposts with little effect beyond their
immediate perimeter. The United States may see the problem in narrow terms of
whether defenses will or won't work. But whether or not some missiles can be
shot down, the fact that they put the United States on the technological
defensive is the larger point. The superior U.S. military position has always
rested on technological advantage. Now that advantage is shifting to the
East.

Technology and the Strategy Lag

THER technologies
are coming down the road whose strategic impacts are only barely appreciated in
the United States. Strategy lags behind technology in both the United States
and Asia. But the strategy will come, as it always does when technological
opportunities are put together and better understood. In addition to ballistic
missiles, advances in cruise missiles, sea mines, and satellite reconnaissance
all work against outside powers' gaining -- or maintaining -- a foothold in Asia.

Cruise missiles are small, unmanned aircraftlike vehicles that fly at low,
radar-evading altitudes. The most famous cruise missiles today are the U.S.
Tomahawk, used repeatedly in attacks on Iraq, and the Chinese Silkworm, sold to
Iran and a cause of great concern in the Persian Gulf. Cruise missiles are
accurate and inexpensive, and many can be armed with nuclear, chemical, or
biological warheads. They are useful for attacking ships, because their
sea-skimming height makes them hard to find until the last moment. They pose a
major threat to any navy, the more so when ships operate close to land or in
confined waters like the Persian Gulf. For this reason the U.S. Navy is heavily
invested in cruise-missile defense.

Sea mines have gained in importance for similar reasons. Most ocean depths
are too great for sea mines, but in maritime coastal areas or waters like the
Persian Gulf, mines placed on the sea bottom can fire rocket-propelled charges
at a passing ship. China and Russia make and sell sea mines -- to Iran, among
other countries. Sweeping mines is slow and tedious, sometimes requiring teams
of frogmen; the Navy often compares the process to cutting the grass on a
football field with a manual lawn mower. It can be done, but it takes time.

Satellite reconnaissance technology is improving and declining in cost. One
day it may be possible to attack surface ships with ballistic missiles. First
an ocean-surveillance satellite system must be able to find ships on the high
seas, and ballistic missiles must be able to home in on them. No country now
possesses these technologies.

The combined effect of these technologies will be to change Asia's military
geography as fundamentally as it changed when the airplane made the overseas
colonial empire obsolete. Whether it takes five years or fifteen is irrelevant.
Military access to Asia will be far more difficult in the future than it has
been in the past. This anti-access trend affects the United States more than
any other country, because of America's self-image as the world's sole
superpower.

Adopting, Not Shaping

HE United States is far ahead of China and other countries in tanks, jet
planes, and guided missiles. Our weapons are still more impressive in any
side-by-side comparison. But these are the wrong comparisons to make. Staying
in Asia is not a game about who has better weapons; it is a contest of missiles
against bases.

Missile development today falls below the threshold of grand strategy to that
of technical and bureaucratic opportunism by the weapon-making parts of
industry and the armed forces. The narrow focus is on fielding a new missile,
or building a better sea mine. So far there is no strategy to pull these
activities together in such a way as to drive the United States out of the Far
East. But a major U.S. deployment of missile defenses could be the catalyst for
just such a strategy. Such defenses could be a focal point for missile
development throughout Asia. Then the costs and the hazards of remaining a
power in Asia would sharply increase.

If existing attitudes prevail, the United States may perceive as a threat what
is nothing more than the business-as-usual evolution of Asian militaries.
Washington is being drawn into a game it does not understand, in which East
Asian nations are using technology and diplomacy to shape our presence in this
region.

The real challenge is to America's self-conception as the global architect that
shapes international security. The long era in which Asia was penetrated by
outside powers from its rim is coming to a close, and the problem is not how to
shape what is happening there but how to adapt to it.